I have just released pacman-4.1 and packages are now in the [testing] repo. This is the first time I have made a release for any software project, so I was glad to have released a 4.1RC a few weeks back to learn everything that needed to be done.
It has been over a year since the pacman-4.0 release and there have been a large number of contributions made:
$ git shortlog -n -s --no-merges v4.0.0..v4.1.0
239 Allan McRae
185 Dan McGee
158 Dave Reisner
52 Andrew Gregory
23 Simon Gomizelj
20 William Giokas
19 Florian Pritz
15 Daniel Wallace
...
I win this time! Apart from the usual three contributors, it was great to see other people regularly helping out, both in providing and reviewing patches. A particular thanks to Andrew Gregory who helped me figure out how to fix something on several occasions and has been actively commenting on patches sent to the mailing list. His patch count also puts him in the top ten contributors of all time. In total we have 45 people with patches accepted for this release. Also a big thank you to our translators – particularly because I was learning how the system worked and may have required additional strings to be translated on a couple of occasions…
Moving on to what has changed. There have been quite a number of features added to pacman and makepkg and a couple of new helper scripts in this release.
The major feature for the release is tight integration between the package manager and systemd. After much discussion about how best to perform updates on a rolling release system, we realized that it was essential to have updates preformed with minimal other processes running. Also, the security aspects of updates mean that it is essential that these get provided as soon as possible. We felt the best way to achieve this was to perform updates on shutdown. This is achieved through a new daemon, pacmand that monitors and downloads updates in the background. When updates are found, it schedules a reboot of the system (hence the need to integrate systemd). At the moment the timing of the reboots is not configurable, but a timer will pop-up to allow you to delay it for a preset amount of time. Configuration will likely be added in pacman-4.2, when pacmanctl will be ready for general use. Until that release is made, Arch Linux will minimize the impact by performing all updates in its [testing] repository and only push updates on a yet to be decided day and time of the week. A news post will be made when that is decided.
Of course, all this makes systemd a hard dependency of pacman. We felt this was acceptable given Arch Linux has officially switched to using systemd. As this release is not tested (and unlikely to work) on systems without systemd, Arch users or other distributions using pacman will be required to make the switch to systemd if they want to continue using pacman as their package manager. The integration with system will become tighter in pacman-4.2 where we plan to use the upcoming kdbus message passing interface – through libsystemd-bus – to allow other programs to interact with pacman, making the development of alternative front-ends easier.
In terms of output, there has been improvements in a couple of areas. First colour support was added. This had been floating around for a long time, but no-one had ever spent the time to create a patchset and submit it. I think the colours for a simple update look good, although those when searching are a bit… rainbow. This can be only configured on or off at the moment. Extra informational output has been added for optdepends, providing details about whether an optdepend is installed or not and giving a warning when removing a package that is an optdepend for another. This also provides the groundwork for more complete optdepend handling in future releases.
When building packages using makepkg from this release, information about all the files in the package is stored, including permissions, modification times, sizes and checksums (md5 and sha256), etc. These can be checked using “pacman -Qkk“, excluding checksums (which requires additional support to be added to libarchive in order to read them in). Other useful features include never overwriting .pacsave files, but instead giving them a number suffix as needed. We have also polished the package signature checking, improving key importing and allowing configuration on how to validate packages installed with “pacman -U“, both using local files and from remote sources.
There are a few improvements to package building too. I have covered support for VCS packaging in makepkg previously, with bzr, git, hg and svn packages just requiring an appropriate line in the source array. Also a pkgver() function can be added to automatically update the pkgver variable in the PKGBUILD. With these VCS source lines, or any other source that is volatile, the value “SKIP” can be used in the checksum array.
An optional prepare() function can now be used in a PKGBUILD for preparation of the sources, such as patching and sed alterations. This function is run after the extraction of the sources and not run when --noextract is used, allowing operations that should only ever been run once on the sources to be skipped. Finally, a new debug option is available that will result all the debug symbols that are stripped from binary files to be stored in a separate package, which can be installed to allow easier debugging (another feature that has had patches floating around for a while).
Finally, two new helper scripts have been added to the contrib section: checkupdates and updpkgsums. The checkupdates script allows you to safely check for package updates without altering the system pacman remote databases. The updpkgsums script will perform an in place update of the checksums in a PKGBUILD, although more complex PKGBUILDs (such as those with different sources for each architecture) will not likely work…
So a long post, but this is a big release! There are enough of running the git version that it should be completely bug free, but just in case I am wrong report any issues to the bug tracker.
Edit: Yes – some of this was April Fools… (moderated comments are now restored too).
